2 - Intro to Personality

Question 1

List the broad overview of personality at the three levels.

Answer 1

1. Dispositional Traits - broad patterns of behaviours, decontextualised, e.g. shy.
2. Characteristic Adaptations - How we adapt to social roles, stages of life, strategies, goals, in characteristic ways.
3. Self-Defining Life Narrative - the story we have constructed about who we are. Highly/completely individualised.

Question 2

Define dispositional traits

Answer 2

Probabilisitic descriptions of regularity in behaviour & experience. i.e. sociable, moody, aggressive.
They are relatively decontextualised/arise from broad set of stimuli. i.e. threat/danger, social encounter.

Question 3

What is the lexical hypothesis & how did Allport & Odbert (1936) use it in their early catalogue of traits?

Answer 3

LE: important characteristics will, over human history, be coded into language.

• They collected are large list (18,000) of personality descriptors…
• A long laundry list.

Question 4

How did Cattell (1943) reduce the 18k traits terms into a 16 factor solution?

Answer 4

• Using Factor Analysis..clustered terms by synonym/antonym & discarded repeats - left with list of 171.
• 100 pts rate 1-2 friends on descriptors.
• Factor Analysis: 16 personality factors; e.g. warmth, reasoning, social boldness etc.

Question 5

Describe the FFM (Big 5) with examples for each trait.

Answer 5

Openness/Intellect - curious, creative, ideas & aesthetics.
Conscientiousness - hard working, organised, regulation
Extraversion - outgoing, talkative
Agreeableness - warm, friendly, soft-hearted.
Neuroticism - tense, volatile, emotional.

Question 6

How can traits be thought of as hierarchical?

Answer 6

Traits exist in an hierarchical structure - traits as we know them are at the domain level - you can also can move up in the hierarchy to meta-traits (stability-plasticity_, or down to sub-scales - aspects, facets & nuances.

Question 7

What the themes of the Big 5?

Answer 7

Interpersonal responses; extraverted & agreeableness… bold/assertive or kind/cooperative - both other-oriented.

Responses to achievement settings: conscientiousness & neuroticism - being thorough/precise or worry over getting things wrong - both achievement-oriented.

Emotional Responses; extraversion, neuroticism & openness - energy or worry or interest.

Question 8

What are the 3 types of reliability?

Answer 8

1. Test-retest; correlation b/w T1 & T2. NB - not applicable to all phenomena (states)
2. Split-Half; correlation b/w score from one half of scale & the other, i.e. internal consistency.
3. Cronbach’s alpha; avg of all possible split halves, i.e. internal consistency. NB:

Question 9

What are the 3 types of validity?

Answer 9

1. Face validity: face value.
2. Content validity: is it measuring the construct? assessed by expert judges.
3. Criterion-related validity; correlations with other measures, via - concurrent (convergent/divergent) & predictive validity.

Question 10

What are characteristic adaptations?

Answer 10

How we adapt to our particular circumstances.
Driven by motivational, social-cognitive, and development adaptations, contextualised in:
- time; stage of life, e.g. toddler
- place; specific situation, e.g. work settings.
- role; function or duty, e.g. mother, buddhist, etc.

Question 11

What makes dispositional traits & characteristic adaptations different?

Answer 11

Traits are decontextualised whilst characteristic adaptations are defined by the context within which a person is..

Question 12

How did DeYoung (2015) describe the elements of a characteristic adaptation?

Answer 12

Relatively stable goals (future) , interpretations (present), & strategies (ways to move b/w).

Question 13

What are Life narratives? (narrative identity, personal myth)

Answer 13

• Richest level of personality.
• Narrative Identity: Internal, dynamic life story that individual constructs to make sense of life.
• Personal myth: story, we try to make coherent, and keep ‘going’, but not verbatim record.
• Usual studied in through detailed interviews; life events, significant ppl, future script, stress/probs, etc

Question 14

Summarise the 3 levels of personality; content, strengths, weaknesses…

Answer 14

Dispositional traits.

• broad & coherent patterns, decontextualised
• predictive, universal structure.
• low resolution.

Characteristic Adaptations

• goals, interpretations & strategies - contextualised.
• captures circumstances
• unclear structure/scope.

Life Narrative

• personal story used to understand life.
• highest resolution possible
• idiographic, no predictive value.